Our support for policies and practices which are inclusive and supportive

The title is “University support for LGBTQIA+ people”…as if the letter to the Times were about refusing to support people.

The letter is bad. It’s bad the way these things are always bad – it’s all buzzwords and rote phrases that are abstract and not defined. Academics shouldn’t be writing bad letters of that kind.

As academics and other colleagues working in higher education, we are writing to register our support for policies and practices which are inclusive and supportive of our trans colleagues and students.

What does that mean? Inclusive in what sense? Supportive how?

There is reasonable inclusion, which means not excluding people from events, institutions, lectures, classes, and the like that are meant for everyone. Then there’s unreasonable inclusion, which means not excluding people from events and institutions and the like that are intended for a specific category of people, not in order to “exclude” or “discriminate against” people not in that category, but for an array of other reasons, which can include an opportunity to talk freely without having to struggle to be heard. The powerless sometimes need to gather away from the powerful in order to organize and discuss. Women are a powerless group, and they sometimes need to organize with other women, and they may not want to “include” trans women in that category, and no one should force them to.

Workers don’t have to be “inclusive” of bosses when organizing. The Sioux don’t have to be “inclusive” of oil company executives when they’re organizing against a pipeline on tribal land. Atheists don’t have to be “inclusive” of Catholic bishops when organizing against the bishops’ efforts to force women to continue pregnancies they don’t want to continue. Universal blanket no-exceptions “inclusion” is not an ideal, and the damn fools who wrote this stupid letter should understand that.

Criticism and critique of policies and programmes that promote inclusiveness, such as Stonewall Diversity Champions, is not in and of itself unwelcome.

See above. See it as many times as it takes to get the point.

Such things are products of dialogue and discussion, and they evolve over the course of this dialogue. However, the primary concern must be with the wellbeing of the people subject to those policies. The vulnerability of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially young people and those who are transgender or gender-diverse, is well documented.

Is it? Is it well documented in any sense other than the sense that letters like this keep repeating it? And even if it is, does it follow that other “communities” are not vulnerable? No it does not. The “LGBTQIA+ community” does not have a monopoly on vulnerability.

As educators, we have a duty of care to our students and colleagues. Respect for their gender identity and/or sexuality is an integral aspect of that duty of care.

Why? How? In what sense? Meaning what? Why that rather than anything else? Is respect for their taste in music an integral aspect of that duty of care? Why should we buy into this notion of the special sacred status of a fictional gender identity? Why do we have to pay any attention to it at all?

It is inconceivable that this duty should be considered antithetical to “academic freedom”. Rather, ignoring or denying it precludes our fellow academics and colleagues — be they undergraduate students, postgraduate candidates, early career researchers, lecturers, professional-services staff or innumerable others — from experiencing a secure and supportive environment safely to pursue their own freedom.

Blah blah blah wuff wuff wuff – it’s all just tedious boilerplate, that doesn’t mean anything but sounds like what the commissars want them to say.

Speaking of pretend academic babble, our friend HJ has another post up about the recent falling out between The Atheist Experience, and another sceptic/atheist host I’d not heard of until this incident, Rationality Rules. He claims to have refuted the notion that trans women have an advantage in athletics pursuits in an earlier post, and quotes a portion of it:

This argument should be the focus when discussing trans athletes. It doesn’t matter if every single one of them are fifty feet tall, what only matters is if you accept the existence of gender dysphoria as at least partly grounded in biology. If so, then the above argument [referring to a previous paragraph that he did not excerpt] demands you let them compete in the gender category they identify with. If that leads to situations you think are unfair, then you shouldn’t be using gender as a proxy for athletic ability, instead relying on metrics like muscle mass or height.

Dude. Sports are already segregated by a physical metric that is not gender: sex. Why do none of these ninnies remember that word??

I’m not sure “proxy for athletic ability” is the right sense, either. Sports are segregated by sex; undoing this segregation is unwise only in part because of sex-based differences in athletic ability. Having mixed-sex leagues based solely on athletic ability does not address the issues women’s athletics were meant to address.

Someone said earlier the issue was not about competing, but about winning. It seems to me that these transwoman athletes, at least the most vocal ones, want to win as women, to be the best women, to be more woman-like than actual women. (I recall a “woke” woman friend telling another person “You’re more woman than I am”; the other person is a drag queen known primarily by the feminine persona, but who otherwise lives a normal male life. Cognitive dissonance?)

what only matters is if you accept the existence of gender dysphoria as at least partly grounded in biology

But it isn’t grounded in biology, it’s a psychological phenomenom, which kind of negates that argument.

HJ knows full well that his ‘philosopy’ is littered with such inaccuracies, which is partly why he has disabled comments on his blog; no comments contradicting his writing creates a nice, safe bubble free from inconvenient facts.

I recall a “woke” woman friend telling another person “You’re more woman than I am”; the other person is a drag queen known primarily by the feminine persona, but who otherwise lives a normal male life. Cognitive dissonance?)

Not totally cognitive dissonance, though. It is also the perception society has of what it means to be a woman. Drag queens usually adopt that uber-femininity that almost no woman performs. It is the over the top image of woman.

A lot of women feel guilty about not being feminine enough. I did for a time myself, once I stopped wearing make up, high heels, and dresses, and curling my hair every morning. I had to come to realize that being a woman wasn’t about dresses and make up, it was a biological state of being, and it shouldn’t restrict me to a mode of presentation that restricted my ability to do the things I love to do. It’s very hard to do Ecology properly wearing high heels and skirts.

Women have been trained from their birth, pretty much, to be “feminine”. To “nurture and care”. To “take care of others first”. To look, talk, walk, and act particular ways. Feminism tells us otherwise, but there are still lots of messages out there putting up “role models” who are so far out on the feminine end of the spectrum in their public presentation that we call come to believe that is what women are. Which makes most women failed women, bested by drag queens and men identifying as women.

Trans ideology requires gender essentialism. Society helps them a lot by the constant imaging, to the extent that most people now believe gender is biology, and conflate sex and gender in a way harmful to women.

what only matters is if you accept the existence of gender dysphoria as at least partly grounded in biology

But it isn’t grounded in biology, it’s a psychological phenomenom, which kind of negates that argument.

I can hear the argument in my head (as I’ve read it online): “Oh, but unless you’re a dualist you must admit that our psychology is ultimately grounded in biology! The brain is a biological organ!”

Well, yes. And so? Some people have gender dysphoria and do NOT “identify as” the other sex.

And some people without gender dysphoria identify as trans.

Again, so what, HJ? Sports aren’t segregated by “gender”, however you define that. They are segregated by sex.

And the fact that a person’s belief that they are really, truly in some sense the other sex is just a metaphysical belief. Belief in God is also “at least partly grounded in biology.” That doesn’t make God real.

Screwed up there. The first bit of the last paragraph of #11 should read: And the fact that a person’s belief that they are really, truly in some sense the other sex is “at least partly grounded in biology” doesn’t make the belief true. It’s still just a metaphysical belief.

I can hear the argument in my head (as I’ve read it online): “Oh, but unless you’re a dualist you must admit that our psychology is ultimately grounded in biology! The brain is a biological organ!”

That approach is also part of the continued erosion of words having meaning. When convenient, psychology is remembered to be the product of a physical brain so that it can be argued that therefore belief of femaleness is now an indicator of physical truth… completely setting aside the fact that psychology is uncontroversially treated as a state of mind rather than a state of body, even while knowing the mind is the product of the body.

Similarly, verbal aggression (which can of course include “women don’t have penises” and similar) are physical violence because “words are a physical action” as if no one previously knew that. Again, it is uncontroversial that verbal aggression is not the same as physical aggression while also knowing that speaking is a physical action.

We know these things are different, and so do they, but this falls by the wayside when it suits – naturally this is a one way street.